Obama-Romney, Minnesota gay marriage polls: the crosstabs

Share this:

On the heels of Sunday’s Star Tribune Minnesota Poll showing a 3-point Barack Obama lead, KSTP released a poll Tuesday showing the president up 7. One place where KSTP agrees with the Strib: the marriage amendment leads by 1.

Because I regularly cover polls, I decided to share a couple of tables I’m keeping on both races. That way, fellow poll-obsessives can peruse the crosstabs along with me.

We’re only looking at October likely voter polls from Public Policy Polling, SurveyUSA (KSTP’s pollster) and the Strib (which uses Mason-Dixon). A St. Cloud State poll showing Obama up 8 didn’t have the right crosstabs, and a Rasmussen Reports poll showing Obama up 5 pay walls its details.

Concentrate on the shaded “margin” lines and you’ll see interesting outliers. The Strib presidential poll — the only one showing the race within the margin of error — is the only one that has Minnesota men backing Romney. (The Strib’s gender gap is yawning — Obama fares 27 points better among women, while it’s roughly 10 in all other polls.)

You can also see that, generally, more Democrats are voting yes on the marriage amendment than Republicans voting no.

Don’t overlook agreement — Obama’s female support, for example.

An important thing to remember: the sampling error is even higher for subgroups than the overall result in each table’s top box, so only large differences are worth noting.

Additional notes:

Only PPP asked marriage-amendment likely voters if they won’t vote on the issue. That counts as a “no” vote according to the state constitution, so the 1-2 percent won’t-voters are added to no’s when calculating margin.

PPP doesn’t call cell phones, making up the difference by overweighting the young. The Star Tribune has 20 percent mobile phones; SurveyUSA has 23 percent in its early-October poll and 26 percent in the new one.

The “Johnson” in the presidential polls is the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson. PPP doesn’t ask about him, but SurveyUSA and the Strib do.

In North Carolina, PPP’s final gay marriage poll showed same-sex marriage foes winning by 16, SurveyUSA had them up by 20. It won by 21.

Not quite the grievous undershooting of legend, but still a small undererppresenation.

However, it’s important to remember that other states don’t have Minnesota’s Constitutional requirement that voters who don’t vote on the amendment are counted as no’s. It’s my guess that polls are undercounting non-votes, and may mitigate any undercounting of same-sex marriage foes.

I’ve heard it said amendments must poll at 53% or more to overcome non-voters. If that’s true here and the undercount of same-sex marriage foes is 5 percentage points, could be a dead heat.